by Brian Hodge
Then the glowing dots of lights resolved themselves into a tight ball, so bright that it was hard to observe directly.
Like a bolt of lightning they shot at the car. Bob was so surprised that he cried out. Brian was silent.
They came around the side windows, slid like a thick liquid down the rear window. In moments they had blotted out everything, and the interior of the Blazer was filled with their light.
Brian could even hear them scrabbling against the glass. His mouth was dry, his hands were trembling, but the scientist in him was observing. They were definitely insects of some kind, with six orange-red legs and fat, segmented abdomens. “We’ve got to get a specimen.” He started to crack the window.
An iron-hard hand grabbed his wrist. “Are you crazy?”
Then the light went out. All of a sudden the vile, bright little things were gone—and both men were night-blind. Bob couldn’t see the dashboard a foot from his eyes. Sweat was pouring down his face, tickling his underarms.
Brian saw an opportunity that must not be missed. He fought for control of his shaking hands, forced himself to open his door.
“Are you nuts, man?”
Brian’s heart was leaping in his chest, his throat was so dry he could barely talk. “We need to gather a specimen,” he managed to say.
“We don’t need to gather anything, we need to pray!”
“Look, I’m scared, too, but I’m gonna go out there and do what I can, because this is important. It’s so important, you have no idea”
Because he knew his fear would stop him if he didn’t act at once, he stepped quickly into the dark.
Bob had never been so scared that he couldn’t move, and he wasn’t quite that scared now, but he was closer than Brian. He cracked his window. “Don’t do it, Brian.”
“We need that specimen.”
“We need to stay alive.”
“These things—they attacked Ellen Maas a couple of nights ago. We’ve gotta find out more. Without a specimen, we’re nowhere.”
Bob put his hand on the door handle, felt it, hesitated. God, he didn’t want to go out there. But he couldn’t let Brian down. He pulled the handle, opening the door into the cool night air. “What’s that smell?”
“I don’t know.”
To Bob it smelled like an overcrowded drunk tank on a hot night.
Side by side, the two men approached the dark area. “Brian, what the hell is going on?”
“It’s a nest. Or maybe some sort of a trap.”
“Keep well back, man.”
In its depths there was a faint purple glow. There was also a deep, persistent sound, impossible to identify. It was a mixture of buzzing and sighing, punctuated by the crackles of static electricity.
“Sounds like bacon frying,” Bob said.
The purple light grew, and Brian backed away. He wanted no part of that, ever again.
Without the slightest warning a stream of insects burst forth. In an instant they were scrambling over Bob. He didn’t even have a chance to scream. Then he couldn’t because if he opened his mouth they were going to get in.
“Get one,” Brian shouted, “get one and kill it!”
They clogged Bob’s nose, slinking like sweaty farmworkers. He danced, a gilded man, plucking at them, trying to get them off him. Their legs were like wire, pulling at his eyelids, his lips. He struggled, but they were strong and they would not stop. They pried his lips open, poured down his throat, cutting off his screams. Then they came swarming up his pants legs and invaded his privates, pushed into his anus. The horror of it froze him.
Then he felt his feet leave the ground. He knew he was moving, and fast. It was so surprising and bizarre that his emotions turned off. He was watching a movie, Bob West being carried down a hole, Bob West going deeper and deeper and deeper and all of a sudden they were gone, all the light was gone.
He was in a damp, warm room. The floor was thick, like sponge. Great, rhythmic pulsations heaved all around him, and the walls got closer, pushing against him. He shrank away but the oozing, gulping motion became stronger, closer, until finally he was completely surrounded by a mass of what had to be wet, muscular living tissue.
There was a wet crackle and the flesh pressing against him flickered with purple light. He could see veins and some distant structure like bones far away in the seething, gelatinous mass. The flicker came again and he was for a moment knocked senseless by a burst of sheer, total pleasure. The sensation was beyond anything he had ever known. It made the best possible moment of bellowing, gasping sexual release seem empty.
It came again and again, and in the back of his mind a voice said: it’s a weapon.
But the voice was drowned out, and he was overwhelmed by wave after wave after wave of shivering, glorious, soul-bursting ecstasy.
2
Brian battled his way through the mass of creatures, grabbing for them. Their bodies were as pliant as rubber and their legs were springy and strong. Even so, he might have crushed one if they hadn’t been so fast. If he got one in his fist it wriggled out between his fingers before he had a chance to bear down. Their curved pincers seemed almost artificial, so carefully burnished and sharpened were the edges.
Brian was awash in them, smelling their sweaty-skin stench, feeling them crawl over him. He fought to keep his reason. “Use your gun, Bob! Fire the damn thing! Maybe we can get some fragments.” They were lifting him, they were actually picking up a human being! “Bob, they’ve got me!” He struggled wildly. “Bob, where are you? I can’t see you!”
For an instant he glimpsed the side of the Blazer. Then it was gone, a blur behind him. He pulled them off in fistfuls, dragged them out of his throat.
He realized that he was being moved toward the hole. Because he was neither confused nor surprised by their appearance, his response was very different from Bob’s.
Instead of freezing as Bob had, he went wild. Lunging, plunging, battling with animal fury, he ripped them away from his face, took in deep breaths of fresh air. He was thrashing, leaping—half here and half back in the fire, fighting for his family, for Loi, for his baby.
He felt something hard in his grip—the door post. He pulled it, dragged himself ever closer. Then he was inside the vehicle. Yanking the door closed, he trapped at least a hundred of the insects inside with him.
They changed instantly. Instead of remaining aggressive, they lined up with military precision against the top edges of the window frames. They were all turned toward him, their red eyes glaring. It was like being face-to-face with the biggest, meanest-looking hornets in the world.
Evidence, certainly. But too much of it. They were revving their wings. They were going to attack. He cracked his window, hoping a few would escape and he could contend with the others.
With blinding efficiency and speed they flowed out, every last one of them. “No! Oh, shit!”
An instant later it was night again. Brian waited, his breath catching in his throat. “Bob,” he whispered.
There was no answer.
He managed to say it a little louder. Still nothing.
He realized that he could see the road stretching ahead, looking perfectly normal. No hole, not a trace. “Bob, I think we’re OK.” Then there came a truer sign, the chirping of a cricket.
Soon he heard the whine of an approaching car. He peered ahead. Headlights glared, then he glimpsed the slick red curves of a Dodge Viper.
In the headlights he thought he saw Bob running. The car shot past, its engine howling. He had only a glimpse of the occupants, who were sitting as stiff as dolls.
The bastards had come back! They’d been ticketed and they’d come back for revenge!
He jumped out of the Blazer, dashed off into the woods in the direction Bob had gone, calling him at the top of his voice.
Silence answered. Darkness enclosed him.
Around him the woods rustled and sighed. The memory of those red insect eyes still bored into him, the huge, wet opening gaped in mem
ory.
He went back to the truck, stationed himself beside it with the door opened, and from there he called Bob again and again, his voice echoing flatly. He called until he was so hoarse he couldn’t do it anymore.
All remained silent.
Brian threw open the Blazer’s rear deck, got out Bob’s large flashlight. “Where the hell are you?” he rasped.
The wind sighed as Brian walked around the vehicle. There were no footprints in the soft shoulder, not a single indication that anybody had ever been here but him. Also, the road was devoid of markings, despite the fact that a large opening had been there just a few minutes before.
He actually found himself hoping that Bob had been hit by the Viper. It was better than the other thing, the impossible thing. “Bob!” He played the light along the shoulder, back into the grass, trotted across the highway and searched the other side. “Bob!”
Alone with the night, Brian slumped against the truck. He considered—stay here or start walking?
No question: stay here with the windows closed and the doors locked.
Down in the valley he saw headlights. When the oncoming car was perhaps a thousand feet away, he went out into the road and started waving his arms. The car, an aging Buick, stopped. “Yes, Officer?” Because of the livery on the truck, the driver was assuming that Brian was a trooper.
He didn’t bother to correct him. “This truck’s broken down.
Could you stop in Ludlum and call the state police barracks for me?”
“Well, I’d be pleased to do that.”
“Get them out here right away. Tell them it’s Lieutenant West’s vehicle, and he’s down.”
“Down?” The man looked around.
“I think he’s been hit by a car. I can’t find him.”
“Jesus, I’ll do my best!” The driver accelerated away.
When the sound of his engine died, Brian was sure he heard the Viper again, now off in the dark somewhere, idling. He got in the Blazer and locked it up.
Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. What the hell was he going to tell them? Had he really seen Bob running in the lights of the Viper, or… how did he even talk about the other thing? They’d think that Brian Kelly had gone completely around the bend this time.
Quite suddenly the Blazer was awash in flickering light. A patrol car was coming up fast from behind. Finally!
As Brian got out, he found that a dark vehicle had somehow overtaken the patrol car. The Viper roared past three inches from his body, a red needle blurred by extreme speed. Brian was thrown against the door. Hot wind washed over him as the car disappeared into the dark.
The report of an officer down meant that the trooper car stopped instead of giving chase. “Jesus Christ,” one of the officers said as he trotted up, “that guy’s doin’ more’n a C.”
Brian swallowed, forced his throat to construct the words. “It’s a sports car, a Dodge Viper. It’s been after us because Bob turned it in to a radar unit this morning. I think it might’ve hit him. I can’t find him!”
“Where’d you last see him?” one of the troopers asked. Brian noticed that both of them had their guns drawn.
“Over there,” Brian replied, pointing weakly toward the shoulder.
They shone their lights around. “Why’d you stop?”
“Electrical problem.”
“So he got out? What then?”
He could not lie. He did not know how to tell the truth. “Well, we saw some lights.”
“Car lights?”
“I’m not real certain what we saw. We were observing what I think is a new species of insect.”
“Insect? You stopped to look at a bug?”
“A lot of them. Very unusual. We got out of the truck, and then it all happened very quickly.”
The theory became that Bob had been grazed by the fast-moving car, had become disoriented and wandered away. The troopers made a search, but could not find a sign of him. A helicopter was called in and it spent half an hour shining its searchlight from above, also with no result.
After another hour a mystified group of rescuers gave up, planning to continue at first light.
Bob’s commanding officer drove off to perform the miserable task of informing Bob’s wife and two boys that he was missing. Brian would have gone, but how did he explain things to Nancy? Her husband had disappeared. He couldn’t show up with a story as crazy as the one he wanted to tell.
He wanted to compare notes with Ellen, but he didn’t dare go near her. Instead he asked the troopers to take him home. He rode in silence, sitting in the cage of one of the patrol units. As the dark forest passed outside his window, his mind turned the day’s events over and over again.
He felt the same disorientation that would have followed if he’d sighted a flying saucer or seen the Loch Ness Monster.
A new species of insect? Hell, it was a new genus, a new type of life altogether. He was very much afraid that it was a man-eater, too. But not Bob. Please, not him.
No, he’d seen him in the lights of the Viper, surely he had. The poor guy was probably unconscious, that’s why he hadn’t answered.
He had to think this through carefully, theorize and try to understand.
Women hidden underground like grubs—actually, that fit. It was very insectoid to encase caches of prey for further use. Typical behavior of colony-living insects.
Oh, Bob, where are you, my friend? When he’d been in the hospital, unable even to mumble, Bob had come every evening and sat there holding his hand and talking baseball.
He needed lots of help if he was going to save his friend. He needed entomology, but also biology, physics—maybe even the damned Air Force.
He felt a moment of relief when they pulled onto Kelly Farm Road. But then he worried. What would he do if the trailer was dark, the truck gone?
He saw a glimmer in the woods, then another. The trailer—it was lit, she was still with him.
But she didn’t come out onto the porch when the car pulled up. The troopers said their grim farewells and drove off into the night.
When their car was gone the night enclosed the little place, the mobile home with its few dim lights, the ruins beyond. The yellow bug light over the kitchen door was surrounded by a cloud of moths, and at the edge of its glow bats squeaked and darted. A great white barn owl flew through the edge of the light, a pale shadow. A moment later it muttered softly off in the dark.
Normally, he would have felt a sense of peace, hearing the bats and the owl, and smelling the rich scent of apple blossom and corn tassel. But not now.
He went inside.
At first he had the horrible thought that she’d gone and left the lights on; he actually looked for a note.
But she was in the bedroom, apparently asleep.
As quietly as he could, he undressed and got ready for bed. She might or might not actually be awake. In any case, she did not stir.
Normally a big dinner would have been waiting, beside it a cold Bud or a glass of wine.
He slipped into bed beside her.
Her breathing was regular, even. “You asleep?”
No reply.
Outside, the owl muttered and coughed. The past hours were like a nightmare, a sort of tumor in the middle of memory. When he closed his eyes, he saw the insects, heard the sound of the destroyed woman being drawn out of the ground.
Vaguely he recalled that there were known species of insect that encapsulated their prey in the ground, injecting them with a drug that paralyzed but did not kill, so that they would be fresh when the larvae hatched.
The woman in the Traps had been like that, helpless but still retaining enough consciousness to suffer and to scream.
Was that happening to Bob right now? Was he three feet underground somewhere out in the woods, screaming bloody murder?
His hand slipped beneath the sheets, sought Loi’s. She let him hold it, but there was no response whatsoever.
They were man-eaters, these insects. He had to get a
specimen, that was now absolutely essential.
He slept, and in his sleep saw red eyes, and heard Bob crying out again and again, from the depths of the earth.
He dreamed they were all together in a tiny, stifling cave, him and Bob and Ellen and dear Loi and all the rest, the people of Oscola and Towayda and Ludlum and all the land around, and there was an earthquake and the way to the surface was blocked. They were trapped here forever and something was coming, coming up from the depths, coming fast.
And he was right.
Chapter 8
1
Loi was awakened by the thuttering of a helicopter, a sound that always brought her instantly to full consciousness. Once she would have cried out, fearing the lazy track of tracer, the hiss of a phosphorus bullet burning out somebody’s stomach. But since she had been with Brian, she had stopped allowing herself the luxury of nightmares. His were enough for them both. “Brian,” she asked carefully, “did you call a duster?”
“No way, not this time of year.” The sound had awakened him also, brought him suddenly to sickening recollection of all that was happening.
There was just enough thin light for the air search to start again.
It was time to tell Loi everything and damn the consequences. He didn’t know how, but he would have to try. “Bob’s truck broke down and there was some kind of bizarre accident. He disappeared.”
“What is this?”
“We were outside the truck investigating an unusual incident. A car came past very fast. The next thing I knew, he was gone. They haven’t found him yet.” He gestured toward the window. “That’s what the choppers are about.”
“He was hit?”
“I couldn’t find him, Loi! I called him and called him but he didn’t answer!”
Her eyes widened, her hands went up to her cheeks in an oddly antique gesture of horror. “Nancy and the kids!”
“The troopers are taking care of them.”
“They need their friends! You have left them all night without friends!” She went to the phone, dialed the Wests.